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Tag Archives: freedom of speech

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

It was going to be some follow-on thoughts to an article I wrote last fall. I wrote some ideas down, read some additional articles, and then moved on to other things.

That original article was about the two-party system and the implications of its health or the lack thereof. Most people, however, aren’t party operatives, who think of the health of government being tied to the health of parties. Most people, in fact, are turned off by language that implies that party should take priority; over policy, over governance, and over principle. This leads to a presumption that peace is around the corner if we could all just compromise a little more and come to a broad agreement.

First of all, there seems to be a miscalculation of who is the broad center and what it is that “we all” believe. I see a combination of two factors here. One is the (fairly) recent double occurrence of gaps between the nationwide popular vote and the electoral college. Add to that a (presumed*) gap between popular will and the majority in the Senate. Mix these perceived inequities with in-group confirmation bias and the result seems to be many Democrats** who genuinely believe that nearly every right-thinking person in America agrees with them. In reality, even the most popular ideas have trouble getting more than about 80% agreement, and many of our most contested ideas have fairly even splits. Elections are close and political controls swings back and forth because there is a split in the electorate – not because everything is corrupt and the will of the people are always perverted (even if that latter assertion is also true).

This exposes a moral and ethical problem. Suppose it really was true that Democrats could achieve a minimum of 50.01% of the vote in every district in the nation. Does that mean they have a “mandate” to run roughshod over the 49.99%? Our political system values, both in word and in structure, upholding the rights of the minority. That includes both the political favored minority and the politically unfavored minority. Of course, it is impossible to simultaneously to uphold the will of the majority and the will of the minority when those opinions are in conflict. The system resists change, allowing the status quo to be maintained by a less than a third of the seats and the right set of rules. This is frustrating to a reformer who feels he is not only right but has the will of the people on his side. Given time and the votes, the majority can generally get their way. It is for this reason that we feel a collective urge to protect the powerless. It is also for this reason that we feel the need to advocate for individual freedom when it conflicts the “needs of the many.”

Both of these are political questions, of different types. There is the electoral question of winning votes and what that implies and, particularly, what it means for the next time around when you’ve got to tally the votes all over again. It is also a political question when asking people to vote outside their immediate self-interest.The first of these falls apart when one side thinks they have a “permanent majority.” When that attitude begins to dominate the thinking, we are forced to rely on the second. Is it sufficient? Has it been historically?

I’m going to refer to two articles that were published about the same time as my earlier article. The first (in the order that I saw them) is a Wall St. Journaleditorial. The article was about the political chaos ensuing preceding the Brexit resolution was to follow, but looked almost unattainable at the time. It was not the Brexit details that got me, but a subheading that accompanied the article.

Free states don’t act on small majorities. They ask what voters really want and build broad support.

Set aside the anthropomorphisaztion of the “Free state” and the reduction to a single mind of “the voters,” and it is essentially making my the same point as I have, above. A majority works for some questions – do we spend a million dollars more or less on program Z, for example – but on the big issues, success follows consensus.

A day later I read another article online, that makes a similar case in ever more persuasive language. The author likens laws to contracts established among willing adherents. Contracts should be mutually beneficial to their signatories and generally will be structured so as to emphasize the areas of agreements. Likewise laws, at their best, state to what society has agreed (maybe not universally, but preferably overwhelmingly).

Given that the author is correct (and he strikes me as being so), even if you are not worried about granting power which will fall into your opponents hands in a future election, even if you can’t empathize with the political minority, there is a certain stability that comes from creating laws that have broad support versus those that you can enforce by seizing the reins of power. That means it is, once again, in the self-interest of the politically-powerful and politically-self-righteous to seek consensus and cooperation in the service of stability.

Is this true? Is this borne out by historical example? The imposition and then repeal of prohibition might be a good example of where a law, created over widespread objection, first cause chaos and disruption before being defeated through the political system. To the contrary, there are definitely examples of social change from the late 1960s onward that were driven by first changing the law. Is this an aberration or the new norm? I hope the former, dread the latter, and worry that we may need to discover the truth the hard way.

*I say presumed because there has never been a national, at-large popular vote for Senate. You can run numbers and say if (for example) the voters who voted for Chuck Schumer were allowed, by virtue of their populousness, to elect a second Senator, they’d elect someone much like Chuck Schumer. While this is certainly a fair possibility, it is also possible that we’d see a very different outcome given a different system for electing Senators. Likewise, Hillary Clinton twice lost the delegate game (once to Obama and once to Trump) while winning the popular vote. To her supporters, this is proof that she shoulda/woulda won the election given a better system. However, it is absurd to think that both Obama and Trump would have followed the same electoral strategy if the path to winning didn’t involved delegates. Obama’s run, in particular, was marked by sophisticated optimization of campaigning efforts to target exactly the delegates he needed.

**It’s not just Democrats. Republicans do the same, but we’re talking about Democrats here.

Something I have picked up in my reading is that there was, once upon a time, a cadre of people who would retire from government service to the British Empire. With their pension, they could move to some imperial outpost in an economic backwater and live quite comfortably for the remainder of their days. Some, obviously, chose to use that life of leisure to write, thus giving me the impression that such a thing was commonplace.

Certainly if I could be spending my mornings on some island in the Pacific writing this blog, with my afternoons and evenings to convalesce, I would jump at the chance. I suspect that, to the extent this really happened, it is an artifact of a bygone world.

When Ian Fleming wroteCasino Royale, he did so from Jamaica. He also wasn’t entirely at his leisure. While he retired from his wartime, military service, post-war he obtained a management position with The London Times. Tasked with oversight of the publisher’s foreign correspondents and blessed, apparently, with a generous vacation policy, he was able to spend three months out of every year in Jamaica. He continued to work as a in this role, at least part time, into the 1960s, well after the publishing and commercial success of many of his James Bond novels.

Shortly after writing Casino Royale, but before its release, Fleming and his wife traveled to Jamaica via New York City. In taking the Silver Meteor from NY to St. Petersburg, the couple followed the route that Fleming had taken during World War II when he visited Jamaica for the first time. This trip, as well as some of Fleming’s other personal experiences in North America, became the basis of his second novel, Live and Let Die, which he wrote over the following few months.

Ironically, given my own introduction to the book, Bond (that is, Fleming), remarks extensively on the retiree culture of St. Petersburg and how Americans gathered there to live off of their pensions. His commentary likely has more to do with the style of living rather than the source of the funding.

Fleming tried to put more gravitas into his second book relative to his first effort. The distinction fades under the shadow of the film treatments of the novels. Live and Let Die (the movie this time) was the eighth James Bond story to be made into a film and the first with Roger Moore as the lead actor. Leaving out the transport of the story twenty years into the future and Moore’s particular interpretation of Bond, the film is only loosely based on the novel. It also comes well into a well-established movie “universe” (as we say today) rather than playing the introductory part of the book. After all, Live and Let Die was written before anyone, except of course Fleming and his editors, knew who James Bond was*.

I did watch Live and Let Die, more than once. Perhaps mercifully, I recall little of it. I do know, from my rating on Netflix, that I didn’t much care for it. Reading the novel, imagery from the Dirty Harry movie The Enforcer spring into my mind, particularly in the novels early chapters, rather than the Bond film. The parallel is, of course, the Harlem-based criminal network operated as an all-black concern.

My other thought, reading this novel, is that you couldn’t publish it today.

In part, the book is something of a “travelogue.” Fleming, the Englishman, through Bond (the Englishman) witnesses the “exotic” culture that is Harlem, gulf-coast Florida, and the black (largely poor, service-industry) subculture of the United States. Then we travel to the Caribbean islands for the “island” culture of superstition and strange religion. For the modern American, the description of New York City becomes more of a time-traveling trip than a visit to a strange land. In either of these roles, the book does so through unflattering stereo-types, cartoonish distortions, and the use of words that are no longer allowed to be uttered. It might be tough for some to “read through” this, to see the story behind the forbidden language. Indeed, the 1950s voice of the narration may well be impenetrable for the modern reader, raised in a world from which such language has been all but redacted. In my opinion, however wrong the use of brushstrokes, the painting itself is not mean-spirited. Black Americans are portrayed as exotic, compared to the English, but not particularly negatively. Yes, they are the Badguy, but it a Cold War spy novel, there are good guys and bad guys. It’s circumstantial, not racial.

I’ll emphasize that the language of the book, shocking as it seems, is within the norms of the early 1950s. Fleming doesn’t stand out with his racial stereotypes or his use of forbidden language. Pre-1960s literature will probably shock anyone who suddenly begins delving into older works. It all makes one wonder what role this plays in the modern effort to redefine the Western canon of literature. It becomes tough to reshape the culture through neuro-linguistic programing if your subjects are simply going to pick up the books of their grandparents and reabsorb the culture you’re trying to squeeze out of them.

Fast forward to 1973 and a very different era. Live and Let Die (the movie, now) was released in an era where “black culture” was portrayed exaggeratedly and provocatively on film. Among our “acceptable villains” of that time, the Black Panther -like organizations were a stock antagonist, a la Dirty Harry. While the book and the film are distinct stories, as well as being distinct in their portrayal of the race issue, this still matters. As I said, my visualization of the book is still bent through the lens of the 1970s, where these themes were introduced to me. There is a power of culture to alter even the black-and-white words printed on the page that you’ll never see if you’re not looking for it.

Behind all the culture shock, we have a fairly decent and engaging Cold War spy novel. There is none of the superhuman physical feats or exotic technology of the James Bond movies. We just follow the path of an agent trying to get to the bottom of a Soviet funding source in the heart of British and American North America. The title is a reference, and perhaps commentary, on the difference between American and British culture, not to mention policy. The CIA agent comments that if Mr. Big (a simple acronym of Bond’s nemesis, Buonaparte Ignace Gallia) is naught but the leader of a crime syndicate, the CIA policy is to “live and let live.” Bond, and by extension England, cannot allow this chaos to advance through the world and prefers a motto “live and let die.”

God save the Queen.

*James Bond was, actually, the author of a bird watching book which Ian Fleming owned. Fleming was an avid bird watcher and when he was trying to come up with just the right name for his spy/hero, the name of this American expert on Caribbean birds fit the bill. One might go on to speculate that Fleming learned from Bond about the Rufous-throated solitaire (Myadestes genibarbis), a Caribbean songbird after which he named the main female character in Live and Let Die, Solitaire.

This weekend in the Wall Street Journal is a piece called Shall We Have Civil War or Second Thoughts? As I type this, the article appears to be available without a subscription, but that may well change before you manage to click on it.

Briefly, it leads in with some commentary on our fragmented politics today and, in particular, the racial component of identity politics. From there, the author brings up the career of his great-Grandfather, a cavalryman in the Civil War and in the Indian Wars across the Great Plains that followed. It then stumbles into the reference in the subtitle of the piece (“Some of my relatives joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. But they soon thought better of it.”) before wrapping it all up with the assertion that our current civil strife is but a continuation of the civil strife of generations past.

I read through it to the end because I found some of the historical references enlightening*. Getting all the way to the end, however, I had to wonder what the point of this was.

The opinion piece is a guest author filling in for Peggy Noonan’s column while she is on her summer vacation. My first thought was perhaps they couldn’t find any decent talent and they picked someone with what sounded like a solid idea, but without the writing skills to make good on it. A little later I went back and checked the bio of the author. It says, “Mr. [Lance] Morrow, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a former essayist for Time.” In other words, an man who made his living through his writing.

It now occurs to me is that what I am seeing is one of the more pernicious effects of the current culture wars and the political correctness that surrounds them. We are now used to seeing writing that is overly, sometimes absurdly adherent to political correctness, as well as the counterpieces which take things to the other extreme. What this may be is the unseen effect of this warfare. The writer attempts to take his thoughts towards certain conclusions, but then backs off, knowing that finishing his thought – indeed actually drawing a conclusion – is bound to offend somebody and therefore could potentially damage or even end the career of a writer.

The article starts off with a reference to an old Lone Ranger joke, whose punch line is has Tonto responding to the Lone Ranger with “What do you mean ‘we?'” But the author can’t bring himself to repeat the joke, or even directly state what he thinks the joke means, either then (during the time of the Lone Ranger radio broadcasts) or now (when even using the name “Tonto” seems to risk accusations of racial bigotry).

As he meanders through his family tree, he seems to be on the verge of making various points about culture and racism, then versus now, but never quite makes them. Perhaps he felt if he stated outright what was hidden away in his head, it would bring upon him the racist epithet. Nobody wants that. So we all keep our inner thoughts to ourselves, just in case.

On the other hand, maybe he is just a terrible writer. I don’t know.

* The author makes reference to some of the problems his great-Grandfather had with duties and authority and contrasts this with another story: “On the other hand, I admired the style of his wife, my great-grandmother Ella Mollen Morrow. One night at the fort, when the colonel was away scouring the plains for Native Americans, she shot a would-be rapist dead with a Colt .44. The Army didn’t even bother to investigate the incident.”

I looked at a number of things over the past weekend. They all seem to me to fit into one grand pattern.

In The Wall Street Journal was printed a review of Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition by Roger Scruton. The reviewer is Richard Aldous, a professor of British History at Bard College and an author of works of his own on conservative themes (Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship and The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli are named in his bio). The review leads in with much exposition on the nature and history of conservatism.

I’ll likely not be reading the book any time soon. Although it is only 164 pages and, apparently, a good and quick overview conservative philosophy, my list of “must reads” has grown rather lengthy.

According to the review, while the book itself is not “dour,” the message of Scruton is that the conservative tradition is dying. Aldous goes on to suggest that, if there is a hope of survival, conservatism must draw upon its best traditions. Scruton himself, much to the delight of Professor Aldous, suggests that it is the liberal-arts colleges where conservatism can remain alive, no matter what happens in greater society. For those following the news, this may seem particularly improbable.

Also over the past week, I have seen some defenses of conservatism as the election of 2018 gets up to full-speed. William F. Buckley opined that “A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!'” That surely resonates with conservatives, but doesn’t that explain to a progressive exactly why conservatives are wrong?

Aldous draws a quote from the book that makes, perhaps, a clearer argument.

Speaking about the progression of conservatism from defense of monarchy through its anti-materialism and finally the alignment of conservative and “classical liberals” (libertarians) against socialism.

In all these transformations something has remained the same, namely the conviction that good things are more easily destroyed than created, and the determination to hold on to those good things in the face of politically engineered change.

This 33-year-old show is about the discoveries that shape our view of the world and, in doing so, shape who we are as a society. It goes without saying that much of technology has seen tremendous change over the past three decades. In a particularly glaring example, narrator and creator James Burke makes a statement about how “the telephone” still looks the same as it always has (pointing to the standard issue AT&T model of the early 1980s) but has far more capabilities. But does that even look like a “telephone” to the teenager of today? Or does it look it merely look like an antique that she knows to be an “olden times” telephone because she’s seen it identified as such in pictures?

But oddly enough, his commentary on technology (if not the examples) still seems relevant. The comment about the form and function of telephones is a lead-in to the potential of the “microchip” to enable telecommuting. And while, indeed, technology enables telecommuting today, the discussion of pros and cons in which he engages remains relevant.

Counter-intuitively, the ideas that conflict with modern sensibilities are the philosophical ones. The ideas that most of us, and certainly 1985 Burke, would consider to be far more timeless.

The opening show is about the foundations of Western Civilization in Greek thought and particularly the pursuit of practical knowledge and understanding of the world over superstition and religion. This pursuit not only changes our understanding of the universe that we live in, but changes in a fundamental way who we are as a culture and even as individuals. The foundation is an argument for “Western Exceptionalism” that immediately hits the 2018 viewer as bordering on “crimethink.” Could someone get on TV today and say that Western Culture is superior to (as is his example) the Eastern traditions of Nepal? I don’t think so.

Towards the middle of the show, he talks about the rituals and institutions that we have. He specifically dwells on marriage, universities, and courts of law. He explains that we have made these institutions particularly conservative, both in traditions and in trappings. Each of these, we are shown on screen, have examples of its participants dressing up in archaic costumes to participate in the proceedings. Burke explains that this reliance on extreme conservatism in particular corners of our lives is a critical part of what allows our society to progress and flourish. Our culture is built upon the disruptive change that comes from scientific inquiry. A large part of the way we manage the change, and the individualistic thought that drives those changes, is by having certain cornerstones of society upon which we can rely. Deeply conservative institutions – like marriage, universities, and the law – anchor today’s tumultuous world in the ancient traditions of Western Civilization. Our identity can persist in a way that keeps us all sane even as our surroundings change at an astounding rate.

James Burke was not trying to be politically provocative with these statements and these examples. He did not mean “conservative” in the political sense. I would say he meant to draw examples that were self-evident to all his viewers.

Yet, to the viewing in 2018, each of these examples is indeed controversial and very political. Marriage is being devalued across the board while its conservative traditions are being systematically dismantled by the law. In the Law itself, we are moving away from the self-evident situation where law and order was a bastion of conservatism. Political control of the machinery of government remains heavily contested, particularly in America. But recent years have seen opinions abound that progressive has reached (or, at least, is on the verge of) a “permanent majority.” Law an order no longer is no longer the symbol of conservatism.

We also see that Burke absolutely agrees with Scruton and Aldous in that liberal-arts colleges are conservative foundations of Western Civilization, an idea that made far more sense in 1985 than in 2018. While universities were already rapidly changing in the 1980s, one could still identify as their purpose to insure that the instruction of the new generation of minds – the minds that are to go on and create the science, law, and culture of the future – had the same foundation in the Greek, Roman, and European traditions in common with generations of their predecessors. Yet today, it seems that the goal is to teach the new, progressive orthodoxy and stifle any opinions that might cause that orthodoxy offense. Certainly the “dead white males” from whom we learned in the 1980s must be offensive to the students and teachers today.

If Burke is right and these conservative rituals are part of what keeps society sane, what are we doing to ourselves in 2018? Progressivism is replacing these historical and universal truths with the “new truths.” Will we have to sacrifice society’s advancement in science and knowledge? Will we go insane? Or are progressives the ones that are right? Is there no virtue in going through the old motions for no better reason than that is the way they’ve always been done?

The last article I read, yesterday morning, finally throws a glimmer of hope athwart the steady march toward dystopia. The Wall St. Journal, again, published an opinion piece (Emily Esfahani Smith of the Hoover Institution) about the Heterodox Academy. A self-described “politically-diverse group” of professors and graduate students has identified and targeted the free-speech stifling environment of 2018 universities. If, truly, we are seeing a broad-based understanding that our society’s understanding of freedom may be hurtling in the wrong direction, we may be able to correct our course.

Hope remains that the twenty-teens may be seen as a weird cultural outlier where, very briefly, political discourse in the West was seized by the politically correct and became a black comedy. As long as the comedy sputters out allowing cooler heads to prevail, we may yet return to the path of progress that we all once enjoyed. But a few dozen professors at a conference is just one small step.

Finally, all this talk of revolution reminds me of a picture that popped up on my Facebook feed yesterday, courtesy of a political activist. The imagery here gives heart to conservatives who feel, one way or another, victory will be theirs. I have no illusion that the Second Civil War will be brief – it will be awful. However, if the recognition of the absurd imbalance between the warring philosophies becomes mainstream, we may yet walk away from this in one piece.

The hackneyed phrase in circulation among anti-speech liberals is “freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences”, which like most hackneyed phrases is a lie in service to an injustice. As a matter of fact, freedom of speech means nothing if it does not come with freedom from consequences. The only acceptable response to argument is counter-argument. It is never violence, it is never expulsion from society, it is never imprisonment or fines, it is never economic punishment–for if any of these things is allowed, then open debate is infringed. And if open debate is infringed, then our democracy itself is controlled by those with the power to sanction speech. Because men benefit from sanctioning criticism of their misdeeds, this inevitably means the ruin of democracy itself.

[…S]omeone a thousand miles away, whom you have never met, and to whom you have no meaningful social relationship, can attack you for your speech. Here I am drawing a distinction between arguing against you, which is permissible, and attacking your speech rights themselves, either by direct or indirect suppression. In this we have a one-way exercise of power and its only point is to prevent your speech rights from being exercised. This is as much in violation of the right to free speech as is a government agent fining or jailing you for criticism.

Important in this distinction is the element of balance. If two people wish to disassociate from each other over a difference of views, that is permissible and natural. If a group hears the speech of one person and chooses to ignore him, that is permissible and natural. But when groups of people choose to punish a speaker, or large corporations choose to take away his voice in public venues, then there is an imbalance that is plainly evil. The right not to hear speech is easily exercised, but it cannot extend to the right to force others not to hear it, or it becomes tyrannical.